The Railways Read online

  Take the north–south bout on 9 September 1845 between Ben Caunt, landlord of the Coach and Horses in St Martin’s Lane, and Bendigo, ‘the Pride of Nottingham’. Bendigo – a version of his middle name, Abednego – had fought the London-based boxer before, and demand for a rematch was high. He came south on a Sunday, to Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire, via the London & Birmingham’s station at Wolverton. Caunt headed north the day after. He put up at an inn in Stony Stratford, just west of Wolverton. Excursionists from Bendigo’s home territory also arrived there and walked towards Newport Pagnell. More came by train the following day. The magistrates watched uneasily, conscious that their jurisdiction stopped a few miles north, at the boundary with Northamptonshire. Finally, the fight was staged, not in the expected place but further west still, at Lillington Lovell (Bendigo won, after ninety-six rounds). And so back to Wolverton, where the station staff refused to open the gates to the mob of returning passengers until their train actually drew in to the platform.

  Top of the prizefighting lines in the 1840s–50s was the Eastern Counties Railway. The company was complicit in the attempt to stage a fight in 1842 at Sawbridgeworth, where Essex and Hertfordshire meet, bringing in crowds by timetabled train; combat began on the canal towpath, but the magistrates put a stop to it. There was better sport in 1848 in a lineside field at Fulbourn in Cambridgeshire, attended by 300 who arrived by fast train. Fighting over, the dazed loser was lifted straight into the carriage from which his supporters had watched the action. Prizefighting returned to the same line four years later, in the somewhat farcical to-and-fro match between Orme and Jones. The latter came up from London in a special train full of the better-off contingent of his fans, meeting Orme’s party at Newmarket. But the police were on the trail, so the train headed back westwards to start the match at Bourne Bridge (this time using a duplicate route that had been officially abandoned a year earlier, one of the earliest railway closures). The ninth round was in progress when the police arrived and everyone piled on to the train again. It halted next at Warren Heath, just outside Newmarket. Orme and Jones recommenced hitting each other, and had managed another twenty-three rounds when the police caught up with them again. Once more the train set off along the half-derelict line, Orme giving directions from the tender, until Chesterford was reached. But Jones then refused to fight on, saying that he believed that the contest had been declared over and had therefore taken some oranges and brandy, thereby putting himself hors de combat.

  Orme was the star of yet another Eastern Counties fight special the following year. Once again the excursion train was restricted to those well-off enough to pay a highish fare, and the disorderly poor were not meant to get a look-in. But the news had leaked, and the ‘Cheapside’ contingent went on ahead by the scheduled early Parliamentary train to the intended destination of Mildenhall Road. The next station after that was Lakenheath, but there the Suffolk police were in attendance. So the excursion steamed straight through the dismayed crowds at Mildenhall Road and a more exclusive fight was staged alongside the line between the two stations. Other boxing matches provoked near-riots at Thames Haven in 1862, when the police refused to send help to tackle a gang who were grabbing match tickets from new arrivals at the station, and at Paddington in 1863. Such incidents were not forgotten when it came to the prohibition of 1868.

  Race meetings were a more enduring popular attraction, as well as a more predictable one. The traffic began with the Liverpool & Manchester’s trips to the course at Newton-le-Willows, predecessor of the present-day Haydock Park. Sometimes the demand that the railways unlocked was more than they could handle. A matter of days after the London & Southampton Railway opened its branch to Kingston upon Thames in 1838, eight excursion trains were run in connection with the Epsom races, a six-mile walk from the station. Not enough: some 5,000 would-be passengers were left milling around the London terminus at Nine Elms in the hope of squeezing on to the last departure. When they were refused the mood turned ugly and the crowd rushed the building and broke its windows. Rowdy hordes of this kind – ‘legs’, to use the 1830s term for disreputable strangers – were not always welcome at the other end either. At Newmarket, the Jockey Club responded to the influx of railway excursionists by staging the finishes of consecutive races miles apart, so that only the gentry on horseback could keep up with the action. At the other end of East Anglia, in 1874, the restive passengers of a returning Yarmouth races special chose to kill the time before their train left by raiding the surrounding houses for food and drink, and in some cases for crockery too. The dirty plates were thrown out at passing stations as the train made its way home.

  Such stand-offs apart, the relationship between railways and racing was generally a matter of happy symbiosis. Attendances at the St Leger showed what could be done for the sport. Before the South Yorkshire Railway opened in 1849, Sheffield people without access to a horse or carriage could only travel the eighteen miles to the Doncaster course on foot – which meant walking all through the night – and then plod back again when the race was over. By 1910 the four-day race meeting brought 1,065 trains to Doncaster from every direction, making their way in and out with the assistance of temporary signal boxes.

  The racing world changed rapidly in other ways, as the railways worked their game of unintended consequences. Transportation of race-horses by train began in 1840 and soon became widespread. It was the death-knell for the old structure of half a dozen regional circuits, designed to be walkable by man and horse, which gave way to a more complex programme of nationwide events and overlapping networks. Leading jockeys could ride at more meetings and leading officials too became national figures. The number of meetings increased and the number of horses being raced almost doubled by 1869. These included a great influx of two-year-olds, which were unequal to the strain of racing after a long walk in the old-fashioned way. The telegraph network that accompanied the railways allowed swift transmission of news and information. Snooty Newmarket found a way to make its peace with the crowds: when the station there was rebuilt on a new site in 1902, the Great Eastern Railway provided separate first-class and third-class platforms for race-day specials, something quite exceptional in Britain. As the final instalment of the modern system, open courses with a few paying grandstands were abandoned in favour of fully enclosed spaces controlled by lucrative turnstiles, beginning at Sandown Park in 1875. Even after the transport of horses moved back to the roads, the railways kept the human lifeblood flowing; over sixty long-distance special trains made their way to Aintree for Grand National Day in 1935, and the befuddled evening crowds at Waterloo station in Royal Ascot week must be seen to be believed.

  By way of return for so much business, the railways joined the ranks of race sponsors themselves. The London & South Western paid for prizes at courses all down its main line and the Great Western subscribed to the Ascot stakes even though its own lines came no closer than Windsor, several miles off. In Edwardian times the company helped to develop the racecourse and dedicated station on the outskirts of Newbury. The Epsom course received a branch line in 1865 courtesy of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, followed in 1901 by a rival branch from the South Eastern Railway to Tattenham Corner – the only terminus on the network to be named after a bend on a racecourse. Football and cricket would in time bring their own fleets of special trains and dedicated stations, but nothing to match the early exertions of the railways to serve the long-established world of the turf.

  The crowds flocking to racecourse, boxing ring or gallows might be disorderly but they were not politically conscious, or as a rule even explicitly class-conscious. It is probably true to say that there was a greater sense of solidarity among excursionists who travelled under the banners of Temperance or of the many Mechanics’ Institutes and similar associations of mutual help. Above all, there were Sunday schools. For the greater part of the nineteenth century these were concerned less with religious instruction than with the basic education of children who might othe
rwise never encounter schooling at all. This culture of self-improvement and mutual assistance, sometimes under official encouragement and sometimes proudly independent, has long been identified by historians as one of the reasons political change in Britain took the path of gradual reform rather than violent upheaval.

  Even before the railway excursion became the usual thing, Sunday schools in Manchester were making use of canal boats to reach destinations beyond normal walking range. Railway travel allowed these distances to expand hugely, and the numbers on the move to swell in proportion. As the Sunday School Magazine had it, ‘railways and Sunday schools seem related and both will work wonders in their departments’. Three thousand teachers and pupils went in July 1846 from Macclesfield to Stockport. In the same month, 3,000 children and 500 teachers from the Birmingham Sunday School Union went off to Cheltenham, where they saw the Pump Room and gardens. Also in 1846, 6,125 parents, teachers and children travelled from Norwich to the seaside at Yarmouth, at fares of 3d per child, 1s per adult, together with 500 ‘ladies and gentlemen’ who paid first-class rates. Long before holidaying away from home became more widely affordable, these early experiences must have put the railways in a positive and accessible light for rising generations of young Victorians. For those among the social elite who were nervous of expressions of collective consciousness, such events were reassuring – instances of the exchanges by which the lower classes could improve themselves and acquire some of the prestige and pleasures of respectability.

  There was a catch, and it concerned an issue of religious principle: should the Sunday school parties have been travelling on the Sabbath at all? Should anyone be travelling then? In late-Georgian times, the custom was widely considered disreputable; readers of Jane Austen’s Persuasion may remember that habitual Sunday travelling is among the failings of Mr Elliott, who turns out to be morally hollow indeed. The Liverpool & Manchester had established an encouraging precedent in its 1830 timetable, with no Sunday trains between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. – the ‘church interval’ – and many other lines followed suit. Even then, some Sunday travelling could be justified from necessity, or pious purpose. Pleasure trips pure and simple were another matter. A summer Sunday excursion on the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway in 1840 provoked the Scottish minister W. C. Burns to denunciations by placard and handbill, placed all across Tyneside:

  A Reward for Sabbath Breaking.

  People taken safely and swiftly to Hell!

  Next Lord’s Day, by the Carlisle Railway, for 7s. 6d.

  It is a Pleasure Trip!

  Easy to laugh at such things today; the organisers in 1840 were less blasé, putting up bills the following day to reassure people that the excursionists had made a safe return.

  The issue of Sunday services came up again during the debates of 1844 over the new Parliamentary trains, when Wellington wrote to Gladstone to urge that these should also be provided on the seventh day. A devout churchman, Gladstone considered Sunday travel to be ‘dangerous in its immediate and ultimate results to public morality’ (the words are from his letter to Sir Robert Peel in the same year). Not only did it interfere with religious observance on the part of the passenger, travel also violated the day of rest on the part of the worker. Here was a head-on confrontation of social ideals, coming from unexpected quarters: Wellington, the old Tory scornful of the mob, standing up for popular freedom of movement; Gladstone, future apostle of free trade and laissez-faire, still in thrall to the Church-and-State principles of his romantic youth.

  Anglican paternalism is nicely illustrated by the responses at Oxford and Cambridge to the coming of the railways. Invigorated by reform and in the grip of a new seriousness of religious purpose, the universities were in no mood to have the running made for them by outsiders. If they could not stop the trains coming, they resolved to do what they could to reduce unsettling influences on their own junior members. As it happened, the Railway Acts in question were both passed during Gladstone’s time at the Board of Trade – Oxford’s in 1843, that for Cambridge in 1844 – and the two share several special provisions and much identical wording. Donnish anxieties that the trains would carry undergraduates beyond the range of control are very apparent. The universities already had their own policemen or ‘bulldogs’, who did their best to keep undergraduates away from taverns and loose townswomen; now these policemen could claim the right of entry to the railways too. Officers of each university were empowered to request information from railway servants concerning any of its junior members, as well as those merely ‘suspected of being such’. The companies were also instructed to bar from travel for a period of twenty-four hours, on request by an authorised university officer, any member below the rank of Master of Arts, Bachelor of Civil Law or Bachelor of Medicine. As if these controls were not enough, Oxford undergraduates were permitted to travel only to certain approved stations, to steer them away from race-courses and other risky destinations. At Cambridge, academic string-pulling helped to ensure that the station was built well over a mile away from the town proper, to the lasting inconvenience of almost everyone.

  The Sunday question also loomed large. Both universities agreed church intervals with the railway companies. At Cambridge, there was an extra provision: the railway would be fined £5 every time it transported a passenger to or from Cambridge, or anywhere within a three-mile radius, between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. on the Sabbath. Proceeds were to go to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, or to another county charity to be decided by the university. It sounds like somebody’s pet scheme to do good all round. Whoever framed this clause had not reckoned on the sharpness of the railway’s operating department: soon after the line opened, cheap day tickets from Cambridge to London were issued, starting untouchably early at 7 a.m. (which meant that the visitors could make a really long day of it). Excursion trains came too, bringing more tourists to mill around the haunts of ancient Sunday peace. Well might the vice-chancellor protest in 1851, with what was presumably an unconscious inflation of equivalence, that Sunday excursions were ‘as distasteful to the University Authorities as they must be offensive to Almighty God and to all right-minded Christians’. The position proved impossible to hold; the £5 fines clause, a dead letter long since, was quietly dropped in 1908. By that time Cambridge had become a major junction, with eight lines converging on it.

  Despite such victories for popular freedom of movement, the broader effects of Sabbatarianism on railway timetables persisted. Even the Metropolitan Railway observed train-free periods on Sunday mornings until 1909, a change that seems emblematic of the transition from hidebound Victorian to expansive Edwardian London. Gradually, the avoidance of Sunday travelling dwindled to a matter of private conscience – like that of the Rev. Lord Blythswood, who told the annual breakfast of the Lord’s Day Observance Society in the same year that in fifty years he had not once set foot in a train on the Sabbath, nor made use of any public conveyance, nor written a letter on a Saturday night when there was a chance that it might be delivered on the day following. Which no doubt went down very well.

  Yet Sunday has remained special on Britain’s railways, and it is worth asking why. One surprise is that the proportion of mileage which closed on Sundays rose substantially as the nineteenth century progressed. In England and Wales, the 2.6 per cent of the network for which Bradshaw had nothing to show for the seventh day in 1847 had risen by 1914 to almost a quarter. The proportion in Scotland was by that time close to 60 per cent. The difference between the nations had something to do with enduring Sabbatarianism, as the riot at Strome Ferry suggests (see Chapter 1). But the chief reason for these train-free days was the same then as now: the lack of sufficient traffic to justify the operating costs. Rural lines were especially liable to reinstate a day of rest. For instance, the Somerset & Dorset began with Sunday running all year through, then tried to make a go of trains on summer Sundays only, then in 1874 gave them up altogether.

  Other factors were in play too, some practical and others financial, some in favour
of trains and others against. Sunday rails were kept busy with certain sorts of traffic – milk, newspapers, post – which had to be set moving to arrive in time for Monday morning (which also gave passengers an opportunity to travel with the Sunday night mail). On the other hand, the demands of maintenance also made it useful to have a regular day on which the trains were fewer and slower, or did not run at all. Less obviously, selective overtime rates for Sunday working became payable in late-Victorian times, which thus became significantly more expensive.

  So familiar has the two-speed weekly timetable become that it often surprises Britons to discover that the Sunday railway timetable on the Continent is not very different from the weekday one. Long-distance and overnight trains can thus run to an uninterrupted rhythm all through the year. Conversely, it is a common misconception that bank holiday timetables in the UK are something like Sunday ones. Christmas excepted, they are not.

  Trains or no trains, the increase in permitted Sunday activities is an index of the growth of a more secular culture. Theatre-going is another, for the strict codes of behaviour expected from Nonconformist and Evangelical congregations usually put the stage firmly out of bounds. This began to change in the 1850s, helped by a turn towards more genteel material at the expense of lurid, blood-and-thunder fare. (For the latter, one could do worse than the melodrama of 1863 in which George Stephenson himself kills the villain-seducer beneath the wheels of his own train, having first shunted the heroine to safety in a ballast truck.) Theatres stayed shut on Sundays, then as now; but that did not mean that the theatre companies were at rest too. Thanks to the railway network, the Lord’s Day became a sort of nationwide transformation scene, as thespians criss-crossed the country on special trains between weekly engagements, taking their sets and props with them.